The best historical movies to watch before Gladiator II

Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 masterpiece concerns a former Roman soldier-turned-slave-turned-gladiator who winds up inspiring an insurrection against a corrupt Roman empire. Sound familiar? Spartacus was an undeniable influence on Ridley Scott’s two Gladiator movies, though this one has the added distinction of having a loose grounding in history. Spartacus marked itself apart from many other big budget films of its era with a clear progressive subtext, while its lavish production values helped win the film four Oscars.

Love him or loathe him, Zack Snyder has a strikingly distinctive aesthetic, and he laid it all out in his second movie. Based on Frank Miller’s comic book retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300 ramps up the stabby-slashy action to thrillingly preposterous levels. Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas, the chiselled leader of a small but formidable group of warriors who defiantly stand their ground against a vast Persian army. For better and for worse, this is about as far removed from your granddad’s sword-and-sandal movies as it’s possible to get.

Ben-Hur’s sweeping revenge drama, with its spectacular action set pieces and underlying message of Christian conversion, was precision engineered to conquer mid-twentieth-century Hollywood. And boy did it conquer, with an estimated $146.9 million earned against a $15.2 million budget – truly huge numbers for its time – and a record 11 Oscar wins. Charlton Heston plays the titular privileged Jewish prince sent into captivity under an oppressive Roman occupation. The film’s influence on Gladiator and Gladiator II is plain to see, especially in the famous chariot race scene.

If you have a specific craving for a Ridley Scott-flavoured historical epic, don’t forget this film from 2005. You’ll need to accept Orlando Bloom in the role of the sword-swinging hero, which is admittedly a pretty big step down from either Russell Crowe or Paul Mescal, as well as the odd hammy performance from a scenery-chewing supporting cast. But when you push past all that, it’s actually an entertaining movie with some impressively large-scale battle scenes – albeit with a take on the crusades that one would politely describe as ‘revisionist’.

With his 2004 treatment of Homer’s Iliad (or a portion of it), Wolfgang Petersen opted to cut away much of the myth and the magic, producing a relatively grounded ancient-era war movie. Brad Pitt’s Achilles isn’t so much a demi-god as a sulky superstar, whose celebrity status and command of the battlefield helps (eventually) to swing the tide of a gruelling attritional battle against the city of Troy, led by Eric Bana’s Prince Hector. It makes for a rip roaring epic that could have been made 40 years earlier, but for its 21st century secular sheen.

Charlton Heston plays 11th-century Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, who struggles to maintain the peace on an Iberian peninsula partly occupied by the Almoravid dynasty. With a local war of succession brewing and a vast North African army amassing at his borders, it all sets the scene for one of the great battles in cinematic history as our gravely wounded hero rides out to lead his army one final time. As usual with such films, El Cid places historical accuracy well below rousing entertainment, but there’s no denying its effectiveness.

If you can stomach even more vengeful sword-swinging from Ridley Scott, check out The Last Duel. It features a much more down and dirty medieval setting, as well as an intriguing Rashomon-like structure. The film follows France’s last officially recognised duel as two knights, played by Matt Damon and Adam Driver, find themselves at odds over the honour of Jodie Comer’s embattled noblewoman. Dig through all the grime and the wince-inducing bloodletting, and there’s an interestingly modern story here told from three distinct perspectives.

The Northman is another violent revenge thriller in which an angry man with a sword (Alexander Skarsgård’s Prince Amleth) seeks vengeance on the rotter who betrayed and killed his family (Claes Bang’s wicked uncle Fjölnir). However, the movie goes about its bloody business in a very different manner to Gladiator, and not merely due to its Scandinavian setting. Filmmaker Robert Eggers has a grounding in independent horror movies like The Witch and The Lighthouse, and there’s more than a whiff of that same off-kilter folkloric grimness to The Northman.

Mel Gibson’s 1995 romp has entered the internet meme firmament for its cheesy lines and Hollywood ahistoricity, but that’s surely all part of the fun. Switch off your fact-checking impulse, sit back and enjoy Gibson’s terribly accented portrayal of William Wallace, a minor Scottish noble forced to stand up to England’s dastardly King Edward I. There’s no arguing with the beauty of the scenery, even if those green hills are Irish rather than Scottish, and the battle scenes are bracingly brutal. Altogether now: Freeedoooom!

Anthony Mann followed up El Cid (also on this list) with The Fall of the Roman Empire, a historical epic to which the original Gladiator owes more than a small debt. The set-up is remarkably similar, with a dying Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius fighting against the Germanic hordes on his northern border whilst a struggle for succession between his cruel son Commodus and a trusted general rages. There’s none of the gladiatorial grandstanding of Ridley Scott’s film, but there is plenty of warring and scheming, alongside a smattering of soapy sub-plots.